A Peek into my Thoughts

Viewing MS Word files on Command Line

I had to urgently view a MS Word file but I didn’t have a word processor on my system to view it in, KWord2 beta wasn’t able to support MS Word files. And I couldn’t find any small word processor or the one that wouldn’t being a gnome and a half in with itself. So, I decided to explore the CLI way.

I came across this nice article on how to view MS Word files on CLI. One of those softwares which I tried out is antiword, as it seemed most suitable to my purpose. A nifty utility to download and use while Oo.org takes it’s sweet couple of hours.

Another nice thing is that it can be used when you don’t have X running or if you’re connecting via SSH.

Viewing the file in antiword is as simple as typing

antiword filename.doc

Though it has a few options to format stuff via parameters, I don’t need them. But, they can be quite useful for some purposes.

Pipe the document through a pager and nicely sit and enjoy reading your MS Word document over Command Line Interface.

My thoughts on the software – simple, easy to use and makes life easy when all you want is to view simple text from a MS Word document. What I miss the most in the software is the ability to open odt files 🙁